United States Expansion and Incorporation in the Long Nineteenth-century

TY - JOUR

T1 - United States Expansion and Incorporation in the Long Nineteenth-century

AU - Edling, Max M.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - Historians of the United States are making increasing use of the term empire to describe and analyse U.S. expansion in the nineteenth century. But this process is better captured by the term incorporation, which is used by Antony Hopkins in his American Empire. Nineteenth-century U.S. statesmen strove to people outlying territories with white settler-colonies that could be incorporated into the American federal union as sovereign and equal republics. They avoided acquiring territories with large non-white populations due to their belief that these were not fit for incorporation in the Union but had to be ruled as imperial dependencies. The American mode of territorial expansion was ultimately shaped by the organisation of the United States as a federal union of republics that rejected imperial rule. Neither republican government nor federal union were compatible with the jurisdictional and ethnic heterogeneity typical of empires. For this reason, American territorial expansion tried to reproduce on a continental scale the white republics of the Atlantic seaboard. The dispossession and exploitation of ethnic ‘others’ that characterised nineteenth-century territorial expansion therefore originated in American republicanism and American federalism, principles that can be traced back to the nation’s point of origin, rather than in imperial legacies or borrowings.

AB - Historians of the United States are making increasing use of the term empire to describe and analyse U.S. expansion in the nineteenth century. But this process is better captured by the term incorporation, which is used by Antony Hopkins in his American Empire. Nineteenth-century U.S. statesmen strove to people outlying territories with white settler-colonies that could be incorporated into the American federal union as sovereign and equal republics. They avoided acquiring territories with large non-white populations due to their belief that these were not fit for incorporation in the Union but had to be ruled as imperial dependencies. The American mode of territorial expansion was ultimately shaped by the organisation of the United States as a federal union of republics that rejected imperial rule. Neither republican government nor federal union were compatible with the jurisdictional and ethnic heterogeneity typical of empires. For this reason, American territorial expansion tried to reproduce on a continental scale the white republics of the Atlantic seaboard. The dispossession and exploitation of ethnic ‘others’ that characterised nineteenth-century territorial expansion therefore originated in American republicanism and American federalism, principles that can be traced back to the nation’s point of origin, rather than in imperial legacies or borrowings.

KW - American empire

KW - Antony Hopkins

KW - federal union

KW - incorporation

KW - republican form of government

KW - territorial expansion

KW - U.S. expansion

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107222242&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/03086534.2021.1920802

DO - 10.1080/03086534.2021.1920802

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85107222242

SN - 0308-6534

VL - 49

SP - 431

EP - 458

JO - Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

JF - Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

IS - 3

ER -